Hua Wenyi

September 7, 1990 | GRACE WAI-TSE SIAO, Siao is the Southern California correspondent of the San Francisco-based newspaper Asian Week

In China in 1987, Hua Wenyi won a Plum Blossom Award, an honor comparable to an Oscar in America. Today the actress, regarded in much the same way Western audiences view Elizabeth Taylor and Helen Hayes, cooks and keeps house in Monterey Park, occasionally works for a dry cleaner and teaches Kun opera for a living in Monterey Park. "I don't find it difficult adjusting to life in America," she said, having spent years doing chores for the husband and daughter she left in Shanghai.

Imagine a new production of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," minimalist in sets but adding all the airs and set pieces of Gounod's opera version to the play. Further imagine it choreographed, as if Frederick Ashton, say, had set Gounod's music rather than Prokofiev's. Indeed, a guiding principle for the production would be that whoever is singing must also be moving.

Imagine a new production of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," minimalist in sets but adding all the airs and set pieces of Gounod's opera version to the play. Further imagine it choreographed, as if Frederick Ashton, say, had set Gounod's music rather than Prokofiev's. Indeed, a guiding principle for the production would be that whoever is singing must also be moving.

September 7, 1990 | GRACE WAI-TSE SIAO, Siao is the Southern California correspondent of the San Francisco-based newspaper Asian Week

In China in 1987, Hua Wenyi won a Plum Blossom Award, an honor comparable to an Oscar in America. Today the actress, regarded in much the same way Western audiences view Elizabeth Taylor and Helen Hayes, cooks and keeps house in Monterey Park, occasionally works for a dry cleaner and teaches Kun opera for a living in Monterey Park. "I don't find it difficult adjusting to life in America," she said, having spent years doing chores for the husband and daughter she left in Shanghai.

Veterans of the Shanghai Kunju Company--broken up by defections last summer after the Tian An Men massacre--have been reunited in Southern California and, reconstituted, made their debut Saturday and Sunday at the Japan America Theatre. Though presented by the Los Angeles Festival, they did so without any of the corporate-sponsored glitz that had surrounded the "Legend of the Water Flame" just the week before, or even the benefit of a printed program, on opening night at least.

TV & MOVIES Emmy, Phlemmy: Just days before the TV industry gathers to honor its best Sunday at the annual Emmy Awards, the American Lung Assn. has bestowed its own "Phlemmy" awards on some of the Emmy nominees: CBS' "Cybill," ABC's "NYPD Blue" and NBC's "Seinfeld," saying that the three shows glamorize tobacco use.

One of the most compelling arts stories at the end of the 20th century was the escape of "The Peony Pavilion" from the iron grip of China's cultural authorities. The great 55-scene Kunju opera, often called China's "Romeo and Juliet," found a new, glorious life in the West in two competing versions, radically different--but both profoundly important.

It's spring in Vienna, and love is in the air. But not, this time, the heroic love of Beethoven's Leonora or the capricious love found in operetta. Not the sensual eroticism of Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier," the shimmering sexuality of Klimt's nudes, or the violent eroticism of Egon Schiele's lovers. And certainly not Freud's interpretation of it all.

July 26, 1998 | Greg Sandow, Greg Sandow is a music critic and reporter for the Wall Street Journal and other publications

This is the saga of "The Peony Pavilion." It begins with two competing American producers, who each plan to stage this classic Chinese opera in the West--one of them L.A.'s own perpetual enfant terrible Peter Sellars. Along the way, it links Henry Kissinger, three leading Chinese artistic emigres, a host of craftspeople and performers, and two formidable retired divas, Beverly Sills, and from the world of Peking opera, Ma Bomin, who now rules all Shanghai culture.